Abstract
To many students of linguistics, ‘prosody’ is associated with the sound or rhythm of words, and is concerned with the environment causing sound changes. ‘Semantic prosody’ is a somewhat young concept based on an analogy with linguists’ discussion of prosody in phonological terms, and is concerned with how words behave semantically/pragmatically when collocating with others in certain contexts or co-texts. For example, verbs like happen tend to occur in a semantic environment where the subjects denote unpleasant things. The phenomenon was first described in Sinclair (1987), given the nomenclature in Louw (1993), and has been a focus of interest among corpus linguists over the past two decades. Using evidence from the British National Corpus, Stewart’s book offers a critical evaluation of this much-debated phenomenon.
The book consists of nine chapters plus an introduction. In the Introduction, Stewart declares that the principal purpose of his book is to provide a close examination of all the characteristics attributed to this notion. Chapter 1, ‘Features of Semantic Prosody’, provides a chronological review of the literature, presenting a variety of definitions and descriptions of the phenomenon. It is revealed that the term has received various interpretations and hence has a multi-faceted nature: some linguists see it as denoting a type of meaning, while others treat it as a way or process that gives rise to that meaning.
Chapter 2, ‘The Evaluative and the Hidden’, discusses two common features shared by all contributions on the subject, attitudinal quality and ‘hidden’ quality. The author contends that both qualities are controversial, in that there is no obvious expression of attitude in some of the data employed in the literature, and there is no absolute necessity to associate semantic prosodies with hidden meanings.
Chapter 3 evaluates the relevant literature from both synchronic and diachronic perspectives. It is pointed out that although the corpora employed to investigate semantic prosody have always been synchronic, semantic prosodies have been accounted for with two processes, diachronic and synchronic.
Chapter 4 examines the relationship between semantic prosody and lexical environment, whose nature has been approached in two different ways: some researchers consider semantic prosody to be a feature of the word and its co-text, and others a feature of the word alone. It is argued that both approaches have some theoretical problems, noting that connotation may be associated with lexical environment as well.
The next three chapters address semantic prosody in relation to some broader issues. Chapter 5 examines the issue of how semantic prosodies are identified from corpus data and what factors affect the identification. The author claims that the processes of identifying semantic prosodies are strongly influenced by researchers’ personal judgments about the world, the nature and length of the textual sequence taken as the unit of analysis, as well as the criteria adopted to analyze the sequence. Chapter 6 shows that the presentation of textual data in the form of concordances may be largely responsible for our interpretation and description of such data, thus strengthening the view that the identification of semantic prosodies may be a somewhat subjective process. The role of intuition and introspection in studies of semantic prosody is addressed in Chapter 7. The author argues that there is no justification for treating intuition and introspection as something to be eschewed, because many researchers who disclaim the reliability of intuition and introspection actually call upon them freely when assessing corpus data.
In Chapter 8, the author discusses, with regard to Hoey’s (2005) theory of lexical priming, the relevance of lexical priming to the various issues raised in previous chapters, and to the theoretical status of semantic prosody itself. In the final chapter, the author assesses the validity of semantic prosody as a theoretical concept. He proposes that the subject could be divided into less broad concepts, given that the phenomenon has been approached and interpreted in rather different ways.
Stewart’s well-written book provides interested readers with a very clear picture of what semantic prosody as a novel research field is, what methods are employed to approach the subject, how corpus data are assembled to identify semantic prosodies, and how these data are interpreted and analyzed. He also pins down the problems with the methodologies adopted in the field, as well as issues worth further research, such as the overlapping features of connotation and semantic prosody, the conundrum of whether all words have the potential of semantic prosody, and the role of intuition and introspection in the process of identifying semantic prosodies. Stewart is correct in pointing out that scholars’ conclusions about semantic prosodies are rather biased since the process of identifying semantic prosodies appears to be a subjective one, and he is also correct in calling for more diachronic studies on the subject. This book is a genuine contribution to studies on semantic prosody, and has certainly achieved the aims set by the author in the Introduction. It will encourage language teachers as well as linguistic researchers to engage with more evidence about semantic prosody, and to take it up as an object of study.